Lose Your Life to Find It

The following is from a letter I wrote to someone recently, and I believe there is wisdom in it for the whole Body, so I’m posting it here.

I am compelled to tell you that what you might see in us is only Resurrection Life from the ashes of our dying. His life over our death.

I have learned for many years not how to live with God – but how to DIE for Him. Ironically that is the skill to learn! THAT is the way to live alive to God. How to lose my life and find HIS.

Someone asked at the conference, “How do you die?” Great question…and I answered it.

How to die to self? My life is truly in a fiery crucible now with private and secret agony. The crucible is my personal Gethsemane of dying to my will, surrendering utterly to HIS way and HIS will. To be REAL about it with Him, to FEEL what you feel and not suppress it. That is literally what it is to die to self. It is a real death…

I had quite a Habakkuk time with the Lord yesterday and it was full of ‘sound and fury.’ And the most terminal repentance. The only answer ever is that He is God and He is right. And HE has conquered me with His Love and mercy…but know this: I am DYING daily.

Lose Your Life for Christ

Chambers says: “There is a battle royal before sanctification (holiness).”

There is nothing idealistic about a genuine transformation into His life and mind. It is not easy, that is why it is so rare. My secret is this! Lose your life – for Christ – and find it.

Unless you lose, you do not find. Today, in our instant-insanity, we think we can find/possess/gain without having to lose! Death must occur or never will there be true Resurrection.

From the beginning of his time with us, John always said, “People want what you have, but they won’t pay the price you have paid.”

Lose Your Life & Be Free

For some 20 years after my mother’s death (when I was 14), I was determined to have a ‘mother.’ Every ‘mother’ I chose and I latched onto was a nightmare of cruelty and futility. Oh my poor victims, how I expected them to fill that void!

Of course they were unable and unwilling. God overruled! I finally bowed and said, “I get it, I give up. I do not have a mother, I never will. Such was Your sovereign plan and Your good pleasure. I thank You that You took my mother. YOU are my mother, my only mother. I let go of what You have taken away.”

I let go of my mother. I died to her death…and then I was free of ME, with a new level of intimacy with the Father.

I think I am saying that you have to live in childlike raw honesty with yourself – from your heart, not your head! You have to live THROUGH your pain, not around it, not in spite of it, not burying it. That is Habakkuk. (See All and Only.)

Well, I didn’t mean for this to be so long and so intense, but the unction is here and I am in joy of the Spirit…

and HIS LOVE, Martha

Comments:

Posted by SandyJuly 14, 2015 at 3:02 pm

This post made me think of a pearl. What it’s made of and how it’s formed. The ordinary looking place it grows in. The difficulty to find it. Its beauty and worth.

Losing always has felt like defeat, but this kind of losing you are describing is victory. Praise you LORD for sharing through Martha, your secret of being real and honest….telling the truth in our hearts. BLESS HER LORD and give her more resurrection power for her days ahead. Give us your prayers for her we beg you.

“How do I die?” Today I would say along with you… “just being real!”. When I was a bit younger, I would not say that because I looked for the cross with a kind of sacrificial and glamorous mindset. (You just might imagine it).

But I now see He only asks being real. You said it so well with your own words: To be REAL about it with Him, to FEEL what you feel and not suppress it. The cross comes along as easy as breathing, wrapped as a true ‘gift of death’ —a gift this generation knows little about. The cross as a “solution of death” working out my death in practice and power. What else could liberate the mess of me from me? Is anything better than that? A Cross that buries away the old and raises up the New! All that work is done by His cross, not “me”. We just surrender to the gift… to the power. “How?” Being real.

It is definitely our greatest gift, a gift from above that produces righteousness, clear conscience, order, clean state and sets clear division between His Life and what is not His life.